Application of Machine Learning Methods for Passenger Demand Prediction in Transfer Stations of Istanbul's Public Transportation System

The rapid growth in the number of drivers and vehicles in the population and the need for easy transportation of people increases the importance of public transportation. Traffic becomes a growing problem in Istanbul which is Turkey's greatest urban settlement area. Decisions on investments and projections for the public transportation should be well planned by considering the total number of passengers and the variations in the demand on the different regions. The success of this planning is directly related to the accurate passenger demand forecasting. In this study, machine learning algorithms are tested in a real-world demand forecasting problem where hourly passenger demands collected from two transfer stations of a public transportation system. The machine learning techniques are run in the WEKA software and the performance of methods are compared by MAE and RMSE statistical measures. The results show that the bagging based decision tree methods and rules methods have the best performance.